you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with a person using passthrough,
You are stuck thinking about yesterdays problems in the world of tomorrow. Yes, talking via passthrough will be a little weird. That’s why you don’t do that and use your VR to call them. That’s why you are wearing that thing in the first place, it brings the power of the Internet straight into your eyeballs.
Look at local multiplayer in gaming, it’s basically dead, because everybody plays over the network instead of walking over to their friends house like we did in the 80s and 90s. People of the future will watch movies together with their friends that are living hundred of miles away, thanks to virtual cinemas.
And those few that want to do things the old school way, they can still just remove there headset in a second. It’s not like you are forced to use VR 100% of the time.
endlessly moving goalposts
It’s only moving because Meta never finished any of their VR devices. Had they actually delivered on their ~$300 PCVR, as promised back in 2014 back when the hype was at its peak, things might look quite a bit different today. But they sold it two years late, for double the price, reduced the feature set to a forward-facing-only experience, added god rays and an Xbox controller and than wondered why nobody was buying it.
Simply put: Nobody has a build a good VR system yet. It’s not surprising why the whole market is a mess.
There is simply no feature tradeoff to justify
Call me old school, but I consider smartphones a gigantic trade-off due to there tiny screen barely usable screens.
The Quest 2 is, in fact, good enough for most people.
It’s good enough for kids that really like the initial wow-factor that comes with 3D and VR (many of which aren’t allowed to use the device due to Meta’s age13 account requirement). Quest2 is very definitely not “good enough” for any experienced gamer, the resolution is pathetic, the games are trash and even the good stuff you can mod and patch together is years old at this point. Once you are past the initial wow-factor, there is no worthwhile content, neither released nor announced.
won’t be interrupted by kids or dogs or text messages or have to deal with a sweaty brow or scratching your nose or adjusting your glasses.
Again, old-timey problems. VisionPro or BigScreen don’t even allow glasses in the headset, you get prescription lens insert and take your glasses off. Your dog will automatically get blended into VR when it get close. And your text message will show up right in the headset, WMR figured that out years ago, there is no reason to think that Apple won’t have that too. Many modern headsets also come with a fan to deal with heat issues.
All that said, this will all take many years. VisionPro will at best be the device that finally demonstrates that VR is viable, it won’t be the device that the masses buy, that will still take a few more hardware generations. Meanwhile Google and Microsoft have just finished killing their old VR attempts, so it will take quite a while for them to reboot and catch up to Apple. Meta might be a little quicker once they can point at Apple and just clone what they see instead of coming up with something themselves.